Book description
Growing up wild in the 1970s, Nik was always the artist, always in a
band. His beloved sister Denise was his most passionate fan. But now
Denise watches as Nik retreats into a strange and private world of his
own creation, leaving her to navigate the real world on her own. When
her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film of Nik's life and work, and
tragedy strikes very close to home, Denise must try to make sense of
what it means to be a sister, a daughter and a mother. Evocative, honest
and fiercely original, Stone Arabia is about how we become the adults we
are. It's a story of family, obsession, memory and the urge to create,
no matter what. Stone Arabia possesses the edged beauty and charged
prose of Dana Spiotta's earlier work, but in this novel about siblings,
music, teen desire and adult decay, Spiotta reaches ever deeper,
tracking her characters' sweet, dangerous American dreaming with
glorious precision. Here is a wonderful novel by one of our major
writers Dana Spiotta is the author of Eat the Document, which was
nominated for a National Book Award. Her first novel, Lightning Field,
was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times
Best Book of the West. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and
both the Rome Prize and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Spiotta teaches in the MFA program at
Syracuse University and lives in New York with her husband and daughter.
